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Growing up in post-colonial Kolkata and as a student in a Catholic missionary school, we made the occasional trip to what we called "old-age homes" or retirement hostels for senior citizens. Those were heart-rending visits: old women and men miles away from their children, some of whom had left their aging parents for greener pastures in the U.K., Australia and other Commonwealth nations. Many of the senior citizens were Anglo-Indian or Caucasian (from India's British Raj days) whose children left after the country became independent. They never came back to take their aging parents, who longingly held on to bits and baubles of memories. I recall seeing many local (Indian) elderly parents as well, who didn't seem to have a colonial excuse.
As a young teenager, I was barely able to grasp this reality. These were no Florida-style retirement homes. The inmates led a simple life of doing very little, and seemed happy to have us over even for a few hours. We sang to them, prayed with them, and listened to stories of their children whom they seemed to long for. I told myself I would never see my parents in such a home; to the best of my knowledge none of my relatives ever stayed in a retirement home, so this was almost a foreign notion to me. I was young and was sure something would work out in future.
After all, my parents were too young to grow old.
Fifteen years later and thousands of miles away from our parents, we are still plagued by that one worry: what will happen to our aging parents?
India is aging and we are not ready for it. Our senior population is projected to quadruple by mid-century, double the likely U.S. figure. While fancy resort-style retirement homes are coming up -- many funded by the foreign-currency-earning Indian -- infrastructure and support systems for the aging are still in a nascent state. And the emotional disconnect can be severe. For a society where children were expected to care for their parents, the dynamics have changed too quickly for a planned response. The same generation that pushed their children toward successful and rewarding careers is coming to terms with the fact that economic and academic ambitions come at a price: that of distance. Being a society of intricately intertwined social fabric, the senior Indian world is playing out in more than one continent:
The senior Indian in India: A generation that worked hard to drive its children to pick up those juicy degrees and jobs -- both for the welfare of the next generation and in some cases for their own social standing -- are finding themselves in a new social set-up that many are not used to: children moving away to snap up lucrative offers and richer lifestyles in far-away cities. With more and more families going nuclear, the practice of living with our parents until marriage and then inviting them in to live with us in their twilight years, is quickly becoming a more stressful and less economically-viable option. Many aging parents are having to learn to be less dependent on their children. But learning new tricks at an advanced age doesn't come easy, for many reasons:
a) Our attitudes toward old age: an age at which we believe we must start preparing for the next world. It becomes almost a purposeless existence -- worse if the children and grandchildren are away. Agelessbonding discusses this problem beautifully in her post on senior India. She urges the retiring generation to develop their own interests and calls for more societal infrastructure to help the aging. Narrating the story of an aunt in a retirement community who needed a heart surgery and got one only after relatives helped out (her sons were abroad and couldn't make it) she writes:
I am not judging them as this is perhaps just illustrative of how relationships have become secondary to employment interests. I almost wrote family ‘responsibilities’ there instead of relationships but I am no longer sure of how much responsibility the children have toward their parents. It seems that , like in the west, we have also come to believe that parents bring their children into this world so they need to accept responsibility for them while children owe nothing to their parents and so filial responsibility is probably an outdated concept.
[...]
While I was with my aunt she said something that made me think: “the doctors tell me that I have got another lease of life,
